Wednesday, December 31, 2014

I’m in the “New
Year’s Eve Sucks” camp. It’s a night for either over-paying for a party or
sitting home watching a top 100 list on the History Channel. Spoiler alert- the
printing press is number 1. There was a time, though, when I was in the “New
Year’s Eve Rocks” camp. It was New Year’s Eve 1985 and my father in his blue
and white thick wool sweater, black hat and driving gloves synonymous with the
enigma that was 1970’s fashion loaded my mother and me into a blue Mercedes
s-class coupe to drive from our Brooklyn Heights brownstone to Skytop.

Skytop is a family
resort in the Poconos. Its charm comes from tall granite walls, an ice skating
rink and cabins lining a woodsy road from the main House. It’s the kind of
place where a friendly yellow-blonde lady serves enormous mugs of hot chocolate
covered in marshmallow fluff to unsupervised children and children actually
play ping pong.

We drove to Skytop
in the morning. I was so excited to see open fields of clean snow, I pressed my
small hand against the window every few minutes wondering when it would get
colder. Once we arrived we learned that there was too much ice to ski. Instead,
my father trudged up the steepest hill that serves as the 13th hole
of the golf course in summer slamming his boots into the ice to make footprints
I could anchor myself into. It was impossible to keep up with his long stride
but he waited for me at the top. He sat down on the ice, in his Levis and his
sweater, leaned back, put his hands into the air and let out a howling
“Whhheeee,” as he slid down the hill. I sat down at the top of the ice, gave
myself a little push and followed him flat on my back unable to sit I slid so
quickly. At the bottom, he lay on the ground doubled over laughing. Daddy could
always make me laugh, despite my non-existent sense of humor. While we probably
only went down a few more times, in my memory, we spent the entire day sliding
down a hill of ice screaming and laughing. Daddy was one of those adults who
laughed like a child.

I love looking at
the photos from that trip. They all came from the Kodak disc camera that Santa
Claus bought for me that year. There are pictures of my mother and father on a
hay ride through frozen woods (how he convinced my mother to do that is a
mystery that went with him to the grave), of a man playing piano in the lobby,
of my Bride Barbie and her dog, of Daddy in the indoor pool, of Daddy wearing
red long johns, and of Daddy sliding down the mountain on his backside, his
hands in the air and his enormous grin.

Tonight, in
California, after I clink a champagne flute while watching the Times Square
Ball drop at 9:00 p.m., I’ll look away as I bite my lip trying not to cry when
I hear Auld Lang Syne. Then, I’ll peek at my sleeping daughter. She’s the same
age I was when we first went to Skytop. She’ll make a puffy little yawn and
roll over in the same way Daddy used to. It will make me smile. Maybe New
Year’s Eve doesn’t have to suck.

Thursday, November 20, 2014

Today is a day for children who will always feel a little bit alone to feel a tiny bit less so. 76% of children who lost a parent surveyed say they think about the person at least once a day. It can happen at anytime, anywhere. Anything can trigger missing someone - the weather, the sky, a joke, a song, a radio commercial. Grieving kids learn quickly it's not appropriate to say this out loud whenever they remember. It's alienating. So they let it sit on them. Sometimes it's a happy memory. Other times, it crushes their ribs and they can't even breathe.

Unlike people, grief never dies. It becomes a part of ourselves. We are entitled to honor that feeling and, in turn, ourselves. That's why I'm wearing blue today. It's ok to tell a grieving child that you know they are grieving. They may even be pleasantly surprised. After loved ones die, the world keeps turning even if it should have stopped. Taking a moment to recognize that is true empathy.

Tuesday, November 18, 2014

I've been toying with a Prologue for the book for a few weeks. After the careful help of this semester's Creative Non-Fiction class at Stanford, I have an essay, but it's not the prologue yet...

November 2013

The sky turns night in layers. First the white
skirt covers the foothills. The orange-pink layer hides behind its mother. Then,
the light and dark blue layers lean back, smoking cigarettes.As my Volvo pushes into the brisk
pre-Thanksgiving evening, the yellow moon shines, “I am ill and sad. I see you,
I see you not.”

Before I let myself sing, “I see the moon
and the moon sees me,” the track turns on the CD to Kath Bloom. She warbles, “There’s a wind that blows in from the North
and it says that lovin’ takes course. Come here. Come here.”Crooning melody slides around me, and then it punches
my spine. I cough, closing my eyes just long enough not to kill on the 280.

My father and I listened to music all the
time. I still do. Songs have a way of delivering my mind into memories the way
that smells do. I think back to our apartment on East End Avenue and a Sunday
afternoon listening to the discordant pounding of keys on a piano and Lotte
Leyna singing, “Pirate Jenny.” It could be any or all Sunday afternoons when I
am six or seven. My flat-ended nose presses against the dirty glass while I
watch barges slide up and down the East River. Containers full of iron, oil and
nameless goods push upstream, all pulled by the tiny, powerful red and black
McAlister tugboats. Before I can cover my ears, Leyna asks the terrifying
question, “Kill them now, or later?” Even
then, I somehow knew that losing people was inevitable.

Daddy died the day after my eighth
birthday. He was 44, a New York trial attorney with an appreciation for
abstract art, Bertolt Brecht, steak, Jaguars, Remy Martin, Marlboro Reds, New
York, my mother, my sister, and me. There isn’t a day when I don’t feel his
absence. Would he be proud of me? Did he like other ice cream flavors besides
Hagen Daaz peach? Am I living up to his expectations? What would he think of
Mitch McConnell? Would I make him happy? Would he come with me to see a David
Sedaris reading? Would he and my mother still be married? Would my daughter
remind him of me? At sunset, it’s worse. When someone dies, you never stop
waiting for him to come home at the end of the day.

I stop at the end of the exit ramp.
Instead of heading home, I make the sharp right heading higher into the
foothills.His absence floats in the car
as the music drives me deeper into memory. The stars are silent but their light
seems to sway with each bar of music. Sound and light are waves. They move
until they hit something and have to change. Do memories move until they hit
something and we forget?

Today is one of the worst days. These are
days when I imagine him next to me in the passenger seat and watch the tiny
hairs on my forearms lift up into the empty pocket of air around me where he
should be. I don’t see dead people. I know I carry them into the world just the
same.

As I climb higher into the hills, the
road narrows and branches creep out into the street. Their twisty fingernails tap my windows and doors, ticking and scratching.
I press the gas even harder. As the gear
shifts, my body lurches forward.

I pull over. The seatbelt across my chest
cradles the rock sitting on top of my heart. Tonight, it is a smooth river
stone, perfect for skipping. My mind wanders again.

I remember standing at the shore at
Orient Point. Daddy stands to my left, his Minolta around his neck, blocking my
view of the black and white lighthouse protecting the fishing boats from the
harbor. “Take your time, find a good smooth one. It should be flat, but not too
big – you want one that’ll fly.”

“Like this?”

“No thinner. Try this one.”

I hurl the stone into Long Island
Sound.It plunks into the water. The
wind on the water turns the ripples’ concentric rings into rhombuses and
parallelograms. I pause for a beat, willing the stone to bob up and skip across
the brown salt water. Nothing. I find another stone, this one blubs down from
the surface faster than the first.

Distracted, I look to my right. The Cross
Sound Ferry Service parking lot bustles with departing day-trippers from New
England. Their wood-paneled Ford station wagons are loaded with pumpkins,
Indian corn, and wine from the North Fork wineries. They’ll serve up harvest
supper in Connecticut tomorrow night. The cars load in an order only understood
by frequent ferry travelers – weight distribution trumping first come, first
served. A man in a red Mercedes complains to a sturdy dockhand who ignores
him, waving on a large purple van. “Daddy, he has bad manners.”

“Worry about your own manners.” He raises
only one eyebrow. I turn and play with my own eyebrows, holding one down with
my index finger, unable to replicate the gesture.

While we’ve watched this Saturday
afternoon dance roll on, the sun has moved. Orange and purple-gray clouds hint
at evening and the half moon appears white in the eastern sky. One or two stars
poke through the blueness. Daddy takes out his camera.He grumbles, “Bloody slow shutter.” Then, he
laughs, “Got it.” The ferry honks three times as the 5:40 Cape Henlopen departs
for New London.

“Time to go. Skipping stones is an
important skill. You can’t be a kid of you can’t skip stones.”

“Daddy, that’s silly, I can’t skip and
I’m a kid.”

He laughs at me and with me, “It doesn’t
matter. Let’s go home. Mommy will be worried out of her mind.” I failed stone
skipping. How else I have I failed?

Everyday, I work hard in a glass room with a speakerphone. I love my clients
and hope they love me. Yet, I still feel like I’m waiting. I press my head onto
the steering wheel. My teeth chatter. I grind my molars to stop the
movement.My throat won’t swallow. After
a few seconds, my diaphragm gives up and spurts out the air I’d held in. “Who
are you?” I ask.In the hills, no one hears me.

I feel unfinished.I put the car back on the road and drive back
toward my house. A hot salty tear threatens to blur my vision, sending me
careening off the snaking road into a ravine with dried brush and horses. One
of the reasons I hate crying has nothing to do with losing control, fearing
vulnerability, or being told that no one likes a cry baby. It’s that the
physical sensation of crying is horrible. My body heats up. I feel
claustrophobic in my own skin. I begin to sweat. This is not polite glowing. A
salty stream of sweat stings my invariably slightly sunburned neck, creeping
down my chest, where it becomes cold; forcing me to notice that it’s
reached my navel. Under my black black suit jacket, a pink
monogrammed Brooks Brothers blouse sticks to my back. My “rosy” face becomes
purple and the whites of my eyes turn pinkish red. From my nose, hot, clear,
liquid runs into my mouth. My pocket pack of Kleenex is buried at the bottom of
a not-quite-ostentatious black Prada handbag in the backseat. It is all utterly out of reach.

I remember a clear October day. Mommy is at
home packing up the summerhouse. We walk out onto the sand, take off our Reebok
sneakers and white tube socks, roll up our jeans, pull up our hoods to block
the wind, and run. We run in endless lines of tire tracks left on the sand. Daddy
is ahead of me, running toward the jetties, now visible only out in the water.
As he runs, his body shrinks and shrinks until, he dissolves into the mist. I
panic. Before tears stream from my eyes, I will my legs, scratching against my
rolled up Osh-Kosh jeans, to push through the sand as my feet sink further with
each step. “Daddy!”

He’s right there in front of
me, but I can’t see him obscured by mist, sun and blowing sand. I
reach into the mist, running faster with my arms open, until he runs back to
scoop me up into his arms. The smell of a damp un-dyed Irish wool Aran
Fisherman’s sweater mixes with cologne and Marlboro smoke to capture the
sound of a voice I can no longer recall.

When I was
seven, Daddy and I shared a notebook. He bought it for me to write notes for a
school project about a Winslow Homer exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
It became something else entirely. I remember sitting in the back seat of our
silver Volvo, the one Daddy said made a part of his soul die every time he drove
it, in front of St. Vincent’s hospital in Greenwich Village. Mommy is inside
visiting 87-year-old Aunt Katherine and her broken hip. She’ll only be a
minute.

“Daddy, write me a letter.”

“A letter?”

“Yes, a letter. Here, use my
notebook.”

“Why?”

“I just want you to write me
something. So I don’t forget.”

“Ok.” He exhales and I pass the
small beige wire-bound notebook between the two front seats. He reaches back,
also grabbing the well-chewed pencil placed on top of the notebook. His fingers
rub the bite marks but he says nothing to admonish me.

I wait patiently while Willie
Nelson sings “City of New Orleans,”
on the radio. I sing along, “Good morning America, how are you? Dontcha’ know
me, I’m you’re native son?”

He hands me back the notebook.
I read his note out loud.

Dear Kate,

This is a letter about my favorites.

My favorite color is blue.

My favorite food is steak.

My favorite car is Jaguar.

My favorite people are you, Mommy and Tracy.

Love,

Daddy

Does
anyone need to know any more than that about her father? Probably not. But,
it’s not only knowing him that I crave. I still miss him every day and know
that there are probably only three or four other people on Earth who think of
him at least once every single day. The world has her own people to miss every
day.The Volvo turns onto my street,
up a short curvy hill. The neighbors’ houses are dark and their shades drawn.
The only light on the street comes from my headlights pointing towards my
night. I don’t know this native son at all. Am I still loved?

I pull into the grainy clay parking
spot in front of my house and see the porch light is off. Yellow light from the
living room lamp pokes through the cracks in the plantation shutters. I turn
off the music. My shoulders fold together as I exhale, my head presses back
into the headrest.And then it comes
again, that delicious pain – the absence I know so well.

Once I turn off the ignition and step out
into the evening air, I close the door to the almost black car, and lean back
onto it. The engine’s vibration whizzes into my spinal column. I remember to
breathe in and out and forget to worry about my clothes. My eyes trace the black
silhouette of redwoods, up the trunks, past the triangle branches to the point
where they become the night sky. I am far from anywhere. There are no sounds.
Crickets are asleep. There is little light save the stars. I’ve always found it curious that there aren’t
fireflies West of the Rockies. Their absence, albeit appropriate for a November
night, adds to the otherness of this place, halfway up a foothill, on its way
to somewhere else. What am I doing here?

Children
whose parents die are half-child, half adult. It starts when someone lies to you.
For me, the lie was that my father would get better. I was seven and I knew. I
don't know how I knew, I just did. They were thirty-seven and they didn't. Or,
so I thought at the time. At the time, I thought they were naive or even dumb.
A few years later, I thought they were liars. Now, at their age, I realize that
they weren't lying to me, they were lying to themselves. The lies we tell
ourselves are the most dangerous. And I am the greatest of liars. The time has
come to ask the questions, I’ve feared.

Who would we be today? Would we even
know each other if I saw him passing on a sidewalk? Would he say that I lived
well? He’d say that I was incomplete. I will learn from his siblings, his
friends, his co-workers, my mother.

Each
interview will begin with, “What was he like?” To a one, they will be
responsive, kind and helpful. As
much as I wish to know more about my father, finding out more about him will
leave me unsatisfied. That is because I want him to know me. That remains
impossible.

I look up. The sky above me is covered
with stars; my eyes trace the dusty edges of the Milky Way. I see stars above
me that shone a billion years ago. What does that say about time? The past is
literally with me. What does that say about memory? The images in my mind are
merely chemical reactions. I can’t bring myself to go inside. The night air and
the illusion of time and truth sit with me a little longer.

Wednesday, October 22, 2014

Jeff Haden shared a piece he wrote for INC.
His claim is that no one is rich and no one is happy. He asked people
who most us would consider rich and possibly happy if they thought of
themselves that way. None of them did. I have a suspicion that most of
these people "forget their thank yous,” as my five-year-old daughter
puts it.
Instead of looking for people who should be happy and
rich, the people Jeff may wish to interview are people who are grateful.
Gratitude reminds us of the good in our world. This is the good that
surrounds us and the good we create – by choice.
What I noticed
the people all had in common was that they were thinking about the next
thing, or what they didn't have. I call this “If Only” syndrome. “If Only” are toxic words for the human spirit. "If Only" kills happiness by making us feel powerless and forced to make choices. Those aren't choices; they are self-blackmail.“Thank You” to others, yourself and whatever higher power you may believe in is like a growth hormone for happiness. "Thank You"
inspires us to do more good works and to help others. When we help
others, we feel better and richer and happier. And so on until we’re not
a nation on anti-depressants. "Thank You" makes the workplace and the world better. It even drives up employee engagement scores.
So here’s my request:
For five days, when you wake up, say “Thank You”
for 3 things. Don’t think too hard – you’d be surprised how easy this
is. The thank you can be directed at whomever or whatever you wish.
Then, have your children do it. It changes your day.
I’ll start:

Thank you for the amazing feeling of sun on my shoulders.

Thank you for my healthy family.

Thank you for time to do what I love.

Let me know how it goes. Respond here with some of your own gratitude or on twitter with #thankyoufor.
Thank you for reading.

Tuesday, October 21, 2014

My husband worked for a leader who started an all-staff by saying that
he only wanted people on his team who were, "there by choice." I've always loved
that idea - it gave me power. Whenever I had a rough day at the office, I
would remind myself, "I am here by choice, when that isn't true
anymore, I will leave." But, I was afraid of this power, so I stayed.

So
many of us follow paths carved out for us by the expectations of our
families, our superiors and ourselves. This path is dangerous because it
masquerades as a "a choice." I chose a certain college, a certain
career, a certain brand of shoes, a spouse. Life is the sum total of the
choices you make, or so I was often told.

In reality,
for many of us, life is the result of the choices we didn't make.
We took the easy, socially acceptable (not to mention lucrative) path
that was offered, but we never took the extra step. The extra step would
be to look at what choices aren't explicitly on the table - and conceive of and consider them. Know the whole decision set.

We
ask ourselves questions like, "Does this get me to the next step? What
will this job/path teach me?" These are valid an important questions but
they leave out, "Is this going to make me happy? Will my life, right
now, be better for having taken this road?" Too often, the answer is "No."
Our collective Puritan work ethic tells us, "pain now, gain later." It is a powerful
force.

That is how I found myself, sitting in a
beautiful office, at an amazing company, surrounded by crazy-smart people, doing exciting and meaningful work, looking at a picture of my beautiful family, asking
myself, "Why does this still feel like it's fake, like I'm waiting for something? I have everything I
ever wanted. I chose this." Scratch that. I had everything I thought I
should want and it chose me.

So,
I sat down and imagined my dream day. It was so clear, yet I was
afraid. From the time I was in second grade, I wanted to be a writer. I
had to be a writer. Even in my years as an industry consultant, I wrote late at
night in hotel rooms. I wrote short stories, bad poetry, short plays,
anonymous blogs and memoir. It came so easily. I needed it.

My dream
day was to get up in the morning, take my daughter school and not rush
the entire morning. Then, I would exercise. After that, I would write
and write. I would eat lunch and go for walks. I would visit museums and
remember why Edward Hopper paintings can make me cry in public. I would pick up my
daughter from school. We would have unstructured time. I would make real dinners. I would sing my daughter to sleep. When the day was over, I would sip single malt scotch while talking and laughing on the couch with
my husband.

I took a deep breath. I
said, "I choose to be somewhere else. This is not my choice anymore. I
want to use my time in another way. My life is now and my time is more
valuable to me than to anyone else." When I resigned from my job a few
weeks later, I was actually choosing for the first time in my life. Now
my life looks exactly like my dream life, minus the cooking.

When my father
died at 44, he had undergone an operation with a very low success rate,
but he chose life. One of my father's partners told me that he chose his
family. He didn't linger at the office in the evenings to shoot the
breeze. He didn't invent work for himself to make himself seem
important. He rushed back from business trips on late night flights. He
rose to spend Saturdays with my sister and me exploring New York City.
It makes so sad to think that I didn't realize the lesson he'd taught
me. Happiness doesn't come out of nowhere, you have to help it along and make space for it with
the choices you make about your time.

If
you were to truly chose your life (not a future life, but right now,
this very second) what changes would you make? It takes courage to look
freedom in the eye and use it. Only when we use our courage to truly
choose for ourselves can we know what it means to be free.

Special Thanks to @MikeGamson of LinkedIn for making me really think about what it means to choose.

Thursday, October 16, 2014

Life is a collection of moments. In some moments we transcend. Our ears hear our daughter's hysterical laughter of childhood, our mouths taste a Chateau Coutet Sauterne for the first time, our eyes see the sky turning blue-pink and we believe in God, if just for a second. These are the moments that make us alive, yet we tend to forget them almost as quickly as we experience them.

There are other moments. In those moments, we are humbled. Our hands wrap Toyotas around telephone poles, our mouths snap an insult at the person across the room, our lizard brains confuse a child who won't put on her flipping socks and shoes already with a cougar about to pounce. In short, we lose control.

Where does true control over the moment, or of life come from?

I think of interview from a few weeks ago. About my father, the person said, "He was honest. He didn't tolerate fools. If he thought you were an idiot, he told you you were an idiot." There's a kind of confidence implied by someone not only unwilling to suffer fools but also willing to tell the fool that they are, in fact, a fool. This is not something I can do, yet. I still have time.

I think the difference was that my father took a leap towards happiness when he met my mother and they started their family. He abandoned the expectations of his family, his church, and himself. He hurt others in the process.

Still, he gave himself the chance for the life he wanted. He chose the life that would make him happy. Once you risk who you and everyone else thinks you are, you begin to let go of what other people think of you. You are free from their expectations (and perhaps your own) to find your own life, in your own way, in your own time.

When I started to write this year, I took a leap towards a life I've always wanted but was simply too afraid to try. Fear governed me.

Back in the corporate world, whenever anyone asked me what I would do when I had enough money, I’d answer, “Move to New Orleans. Buy a B and B in the Garden District and write all afternoon.” Sometimes the B and B was in Quogue, NY. Over the years, I gave up saying that. “I’d be right where I am.” With that one cowardly lie, masquerading as a positive attitude, I reduced myself to living a life I didn't really want to live. The reason I felt like an imposter was not that I believed I was incompetent, it was that I really wanted to be somewhere else entirely.

The girl looking for approval and safety reminded me that I should want to be on that path. For another day, I would wait for that moment when what I want and what I should want become one and the same. And then, I took my own leap toward the life I've always wanted.

Freedom is useless without courage. It took me so long to hear that message, I just wish I'd listened earlier. Then again, the best lessons are often learned the hard way.

Monday, October 6, 2014

Last night, I gave into the
temptation to wallow. Brian and I watched, The Fault in Our Stars. From
the first few minutes in, I found myself shocked at how different the
experience of a camera, as a narrator, would make the entire story. My favorite
device the author uses is a book within a book, where the characters encounter
the phrase, “Pain demands to be felt.” What could be more true? Perhaps, the
corollary that “Love demands to be given?”

When I read the book, on a
transcontinental SFO to JFK United flight, I didn’t shed a single tear.
Although I prefer to pretend otherwise, books and movies make me cry. I have
been known to be the really unstable bawling and sniffling chick with the
cashmere turtleneck pulled up to her eyes in 7B (more than once). What makes me
different than the typical really unstable bawling and sniffling chick with the
cashmere turtleneck pulled up to her eyes in 7B is that I am reading something
Stiglitz wrote about income inequality and remain happily married.

There I sat, on my blue sofa, in a
ratty t-shirt, shocked when the tears streamed down my face. I discovered one
of the reasons I hate crying has nothing to do with losing control, fearing
vulnerability, or being told that no one likes a cry baby. It’s that the
physical sensation of crying is horrible.

My body heats up. I feel claustrophobic
in my own skin. I sweat. This is not polite glowing. A salty stream of sweat
stings my invariably slightly sunburned neck, creeping down my chest, where it
becomes cold,forcing me to notice that
its reached my navel. My “rosy” face becomes purple and the whites of my eyes
turn pinkish red. To complete the image, my nose runs a hot, clear, liquid and
I never have a tissue.

The reaction I was having was not
to watching two star crossed lovers, but to knowing that people die leaving
things unfinished. All those meals never
eaten, songs left unsung, chances to choose kindness missed, sunsets
unwatched, babies' laughter unheard. Yet, if we are there and eat those meals,
sing those songs, watch the sunsets and make the babies laugh, we bring the lost along
with us. We never stop loving people when they die. That is our privilege - to
live with their love. That remains. And it gives us hope.

My apologies, I re-read Augustine, Proust and Rousseau for a
class over the past week – this can’t continue much longer. I can barely
stand myself. God, forgive us our pretentiousness, we know not the boredom it causes.

Thursday, September 11, 2014

Today I listened to Gabriel's Oboe over and
over. It’s the theme from the film, The
Mission. When I made my confirmation, it was required viewing. Rarely does
a film pack so many questions into one story. My mother and father saw it the
theater. She recalls the two of them walking New York’s streets for hours afterwards.
Neither of them had words for it. Instead, they walked in saturated silence.

The story is of a Spanish mission that thrived in the Amazon
during Colonial times. It’s success threatened authorities both governmental
and clerical.The powerful never falter
in their desire to squash the truly free. It is their greatest fear. When it
comes time to defend the mission, two priests fight alongside the native people.
One fights by sword, the other by prayer. For both of them, the truly good
sought fairness in all things, opening themselves to criticism and ostracism in
their quest for right. Often, the free, possessing a power of a different nature,
fail. Neither man survived.

I can’t imagine the film without it’s score. Music tells the
story through dense emotions, those we never named.It’s record filled our Upper East Side
Apartment for weeks. The opening mimics the first sound after the quiet heard
at sunrise. It floats as more instruments join, each creating a different chill
and charge. Then, the chorus perfects the pieces, coming just shy of exploding
and destroying it. Nuance at its most raw. The build up reminds me of the
promise tomorrow brings when today feels wasted. But no effort is ever wasted,
no kindness to small to matter. Daddy taught me this. Mommy perfected it.

Music makes visceral memory. Bow over string transports me
through time even more than the smell of the beach.At times, I believed I could smell my father
on a wave of sound. When something amazing plays, I still do. Sound wraps
around my shoulders. It rests against my back and squeezes my ribs. When I look
up, no one is there.

My father’s best friend, Peter, said it best. “We went to a
Irish bar on the East Side – a dark, smoky place. We drank and listened to
Irish War ballads, not quite like Tommy Clancy. It was the most moving experience
I ever had in my life. I’ve searched for years to find that music.” To search
is to know you still love.

Before Ellie was born, Brian and I traveled to South East
Asia. In Hoi An, a beach town in Vietnam, I woke up before dawn. I sat outside
with a camera and watched the world wake up. Fishermen put out to sea in round,
wicker boats. A mother held her baby in her lap. They clapped together. The
quiet was perfect. It is in quiet that
we build connections with another.

These images and moments are so complete unto themselves;
they seem impossible in worlds of noise and glowing screens. But it was this
world of moments and images that I inhabited with Daddy. Our time was
uninterrupted. When we were together, we belonged in a world entirely of our
own making. Only recently did I learn that I can go there whenever I wish, but
the ticket is always round-trip and I travel there alone.

Wednesday, July 16, 2014

The metal arm of my beach chair clunks against my back. It's one millimeter from painful. White sand sticks to the sweaty skin on the back of my calves. Only the breeze
from the waves cuts through the 97% humid Long Island summer air. Behind the
haze, the sun burns longing to reveal a clear periwinkle sky.It’s a perfect day. It's a day I've seen hundreds of times before, but it never ceases to save me.

I drop the chair and my enormous canvas bag filled with towels, books, sunscreen and the remnants of my daughter's late afternoon snack from yesterday. I remove my obscenely over-priced red coral beaded tunic to reveal an ultra-conservative black
skirted swimsuit. My chair squeaks as it unfolds with a little extra push. I flop down onto the chair and open my father's mid-shipman's log. That's why I'm here - to discover someone I lost or never knew. Me.

Whenever I felt awful growing up, the beach was salvation. After anyone died, I found freedom here. My mother brought me here when I couldn't look at other children with their fathers at a camp barbecue. I sat on the roof of a surfboard shack in the 30 degree wind until I could feel nothing else when my high school boyfriend and I finally called it quits. It’s like leaving the planet for a little
while. No one can touch you.

To find escape, you walk down a long white path of wooden boards through a field of
beach grass. Behind you is a beach club with shouting children, a frigid swimming pool and the smell of fat burning on a grill. Ahead of you is white sand, grey-green-blue-ocean and a fuzzy horizon line - the edge of the world. Even though it’s only about
500 steps to the breaking waves, it feels like miles. Once you’re there, in your beach chair, under a blue and white umbrella, reading and re-reading sea-spray damp pages of your book through sunglasses dirtied by fingerprints absorbing fog, you are somewhere else. Alone and comfortably lonely. Here, for just a
little while, you are free of everything behind you, free to inhale whatever emotion sits on your chest. There is no judgment, just being.

Daddy and I came to the beach even in the off-season. I remember a clear
October day. Mommy was probably stuck packing up the summer house. We went out
onto the sand, took off our Reebok sneakers and white tube socks, rolled up our
jeans, pulled up our hoods to block the wind, and ran. We ran in endless lines of tire tracks left on the sand. He was ahead of me, running toward the jetties, which
are now visible only out in the water. As he ran, his body shrunk and shrunk
until, he dissolved into the mist. I panicked. As tears streamed from my eyes,
I willed my legs, scratching against my rolled up Osh-Kosh jeans to push through the sand
as my feet sank further with each step.

“Daddy!”

He was right there in front of me, but I couldn’t see him
obscured by mist, sun and sand blowing in the wind.I reached into the mist, running faster with my arms open, until he ran back to scoop me up into his arms. Even then, I knew that loss was the
inevitable outcome of life.

That’s why I’m here, back in this small town on the Atlantic Ocean. I've come and gone, moved from the green woods of the mid-Atlantic, to the jungle heat and bugs of the Deep South, to the face-splitting cold of the Midwest, to the twilight-at-noon-light of Northern California. But, it is only here, where the surf burns my ankles from the cold, that I am not running away. For as long as I can remember, I felt like a
story lived inside me, hidden and unwritten. That story is who I am, who I am
meant to be, and how I enter the world.

As I read through his Midshipman's log, five yards from the
breaking surf, I know that this is finally real. As I see Ellie, learning to be
of the beach and sea, I am finally sure I’ve saved a part of him and carried
him into the world for as long as she and I live.